WH!TLESS
from 04/18/2008
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In this strip I finally get to introduce Gunther and his gnome army. This did give me a bit of a problem, though. When I began the strip, I drew Alana_in_VA as her gnome Gunther, since she used it for her avatar all the time (except I added Alana’s glasses to Gunther.) But for this plot, I now needed Gunther and Alana to appear as separate characters, so I had to draw Alana as herself. I added some flair with a gnome hat and a “VA” shirt.
No one called me on this one, but if you look at the last panel, Alana’s shirt reads “AV”. That’s because I used the same drawing of Alana from panel 4, but mirrored it so she’d be looking in the opposite direction. When I did this, her “VA” became “AV”. I did it accidentally, but thought it was funny, so I left it in.
As I mentioned, these are the goofy things that amuse me.
By this time I had 60 Whitless characters, maybe more. When I first started the strip, I just used whichever characters it seemed I hadn’t used in a while. Because I  had so many characters, and my memory is so bad, this wasn’t working anymore, I realized there were some characters I hadn’t been using. I know that the Whitnesses wouldn’t care as they’re all cool people, but I also knew they like to see their character in the strip. So I started keeping track of appearances in a spreadsheet. I still needed certain characters for certain jokes, but whenever I had a non-specific joke, or needed to fill out a crowd, I’d use someone that hadn’t appeared often, or recently.





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